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Here’s some news courtesy of Beefjack- looks like it’s not just Steam that’s performing cut-price shenanigans right now. As of today, Green Man Gaming are offering what they call a ‘Try and Trade’ deal. Basically, you buy and download any one of the selected games, and if you ask for your money back before Midnight PST on Sunday they’ll refund all but £1/$1/€1. More than that, Ice-Pick Lodge’s nightmare afterlife sim The Void is one of the game’s on offer! Here is me talking passionately about The Void. Here’s that link to the offer again. You know what you gotta do. You do.

EDIT: Aiee, turns out that refund takes the form of store credit, turning this from a lovely offer into a lovely offer with a tiny barb stuck inside it. Careful, readers.

It was just too boring, not really too hard, I got tired of wandering senseless before even dying a single time or whatever. I’ll gladly give it another spin now that I know better what kind of game is

Don’t use this service. A couple weeks ago I bought Grand Ages: Rome. I downloaded the client and it hasn’t worked ever since, I’ve tried every day. Moreover, their customer service hasn’t answered my emails yet. A shame.

When they did the Painkiller Black free deal, I downloaded it twice through their client, ending up with a magnificent empty 2.8gb directory each time. I complained to their CS and they sent some puzzled apologies. About three weeks later I received another more upbeat email saying they had solved the problem, by which time I had nabbed it on a Steam sale and had played it through :-(

Hi Òscar,
Sorry to hear that you’re having problems with the game and the GMG service. I’ve had a look through our tickets and can find no ticket relating to Grand Ages: Rome; could you please give me your ticket number and I’ll follow it up as a matter of urgency.

A jackhammer? Thanks God, I was starting to wonder whether that first alien was humping another alien of different species, and if that could be qualified either as zoophilia or only interracial sex. But now it looks much more benign. He’s just a fetishist.

From their site:
“Grotesque Tactics combines the features and clichés of Western and Asian console role playing games (such as Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics) and provides a highly addicting and entertaining change to the current more serious role playing titles. To protect the kingdom from the merciless cult “The Dark Church” which has murdered all heroes and knights you will have to hire dubious soldiers – and rescue jealous maidens who will follow you into combat as your groupies. Up to 10 heroes are deployed in tactical battles to take on the Dark Church with their special abilities.”

Why haven’t I heard of this game
*looks at Quin severely*
*looks at everyone else*
Views on it anyone?

Whoops. You know, we’ve been receiving press releases about Grotesque Tactics for months. I’m actually way more likely to pay attention to that one guy sending me a one-liner email than the publisher who sends a press release a week. This is because I am broken.

I have buy it, and… there are good things in it. Seems a 60% a game with console-y style, a 60% a game with decent tile based strategy combat, and a 60% story that is supposedly fun.
The consoley thing is not a accident, but by design. I don’t know what to think about the game, really, I have played a few levels and abandoned it. You must ask for a second opinion.

But isn’t the money you’re refunded basically just store credit? I’ve already got £9 tied up with that service (from the 1p I’ve spent there) and I’m having a hard enough time finding something to sink that into. The constant reactivations and limited catalogue are pretty big turn offs for me.

£1 demo it is. Not that it’s a bad idea. People have suggested paid for demos before, but have basically meant charging for the sort of one or two level demos we get already. Here at least you might finish the whole game. It’ll certainly be more representative of the full thing.
I suppose the other way of looking at it is a £1 rental.

It’s not really an offer though, no, as you’d still have to pay (up to) full price if you want to actually keep the game.

Is there any DRM or the need to download a client?
I don’t think I want to buy a game I can’t play offline from a service i don’t know when will die or something, Gog.com beta stunt scared the shit out of me that time

Yes and yes.
The client is called capsule is being updated all the bloody time. Would be fine except it doesn’t seem to add anything, it just prolongs the time between deciding to play something and actually playing it.
The DRM is online activation followed by reactivation after every three days.

It is deactivated when you get your refund – which is, as has been noted, store credit only.
Also, you have to use the rather buggy Capsule client to check in every 3 days, or lose access to your games. As DRM goes, it sits at “barely better than Ubisoft”.

Yeah, the service is a nice idea, but the DRM they need to deactivate your games after you trade them back in is problematic. For instance, I don’t think you’re likely to get any mods working with games from GMG, and I had issues patching Victoria II which I got off them a while back (they’ve since got their own patching service working which fixed it, but still). If there are games you think you’ll want to play a short while and then never play again it’s an ok service, but I wouldn’t recommend buying any games you want to keep forever.

The very first 3D adventures. Stuff like Castle Master, Total Eclipse, Driller, Dark Side, etc. First-person adventures where you were thrown into an abstract, hostile environment and through trial and error (it was expected that you’d die many times before winning), discover the rules and eventually conquer the world around you.

It also can’t fail to remind you of Looking Glass. It could only be a PC game. It drips with atmosphere but it’s deep atmosphere, the kind that you have to honour. It’s not like, say Call of Duty, which obviously has it’s own kind of atmosphere, but could be played while chatting with your mates. The Void is dreamy and deep, and has an extraordinary feel. It would seem I’m far from alone in playing System Shock 2 when it first came out and being aware immediately that the game was trying to draw me in. It was unlike anything I’d ever played, from the absolute beginning, through sheer density of atmosphere. Consequently, it was an unforgettable experience. The Void has the same focus on immersion.

It’s also a lot like Myst. Enormous work has gone on the environments. They seem to MEAN something. They’re also architecturally superb and beautiful to behold.

It’s like, for example, KGB and Floor 13 which we were talking about last month, and other similar titles of the early 90s, in that it doesn’t hold your hand for shit. I mean, I know what it’s like to avoid games that are inaccessible. I’m scared of most strategy games for this reason. I don’t like to not know how to play. With The Void, you know how to play, but you don’t know how BEST to play and the joy is in discovering that for yourself. That is enormously, epoch-shatteringly refreshing in an age where we have Fable going THIS IS A TREASURE CHEST YOU WANT TREASURE HERE IT IS DIG IT PRESS X ON YOUR CONTROLLER USE YOUR THUMB NO YOUR THUMB NEARLY GREAT GOOD WORK!!!

More than anything else, it’s reminiscient of the past because in the past the industry was less afraid. You should play it if you find it offensive that we now have games that have a flashing line on the floor that tells you the direction you should be running in.

Just a polite warning on this – I took advantage of a GMG ‘free game’ offer some time ago and I chose “The Void”.

The version they offered wouldn’t work on any PC I owned at the time (2 XP, 1 Vista and 1 W7) so I contacted their support and waited.

After getting no reply from GMG, I ‘acquired’ a dodgy version of the game and it worked!!

A quick file comparison showed that the GMG version was missing a configuration file, so I confirmed with Ice-Pick Lodge what was needed in that file (they responded through their forums almost instantly) and I then re-contacted GMG to tell them what was going on/copy the file to them.

Several days later GMG responded to my first email to say they were aware of the issue but didn’t have a fix!!

I re-downloaded the game about a month later and it STILL didn’t work – just saying that their tech support isn’t much and that there IS a fix if you run into that particular error – but goto IPL and not GMG.

p.s. “The Void” is brilliant if you use the fan-made patch to make it a bit easier – out-of-the-box is just stupidly hard/punishing for a first-timer.

Reading about The Void made me read about Pathologic and want to play it. Only it’s either out-of-print or really expensive for a 5 y-o game (£20+ on Amazon or Gamersgate). Back in 2008 when Quinns did his three-part review/let’s play it sold for £5 or 7, so… no !

I have to buy everything from Steam because I like the icons/large art on the library view. I got The Void from Greenman but it doesn’t have a large thumbnail when you add it to the Steam library – this drives me nuts. I am aware that this is the worst reason ever for using Steam exclusively.